MIT Communications Forum: News or Entertainment – Press and Modern Political Campaigns

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:30:45 GMT

Opening Remarks: Noel Jackson
Moderator: Seth Mnookin
Panelists: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mark Mckinnon

Recorded April 11, 2013

MOOCs and the Emerging Digital Classroom

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 07:07:14 GMT

Developing New Tools for Leveraging Data

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:30:46 GMT

Economic Complexity Expanding Concepts of Development

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:30:46 GMT

A brief discussion by César Hidalgo, the Asahi Broadcast Corporation Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences.

Measuring Perceptions and Building Bridges Between Theory and Observation

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:30:46 GMT

A brief discussion by César Hidalgo, the Asahi Broadcast Corporation Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences.

The Boston Globe in the Digital Age

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:30:45 GMT

A Phantasmal Media Approach to Empowerment, Identity and Computation

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:30:48 GMT

Courtesy of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture

Part of Digital Inflections: Visions for the Posthuman Future

Dr. Fox Harrell, Associate Professor of Digital Media in the Comparative Media Studies Program and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.

Focusing on questions of social identity, empowerment and computation, Fox Harrell explores the emerging world of “phantasmal identities,” that moment when the meaning of social identity is complicated by its intersection with computing technologies including social networking, gaming, virtual worlds and more. Here, social identities are not addressed only through persistent issues of class, gender, sex, race, and ethnicity, but also through dynamic construction of social categories, body language, discourse, metaphorical thought, gesture, fashion, and so on. When these “real” identities meet their counterparts in the virtual world, the results are identities that are a sudden blend of cultural ideas and sensory imagination, namely the increasing development of “phantasmal identities.”

Francis Steen: "The News as a Social Process for Improving Society"

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 21:30:46 GMT

Francis Steen is associate professor of communication studies at UCLA and director of the UCLA Library Communication Studies Archive, a multimodal research corpus of some 200,000 television news programs automatically annotated by two billion words from closed captioning and transcripts. He and Mark Turner jointly direct the Red Hen Lab, a globally distributed laboratory for research on multimodal communication.

Sponsored by the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

Experimenting, Tinkering and Failing

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 08:06:04 GMT

Jonathan Harris and Katie Salen discuss the merits of experimentation in both creativity and learning.

Chris Hayes and Ta-Nahisi Coates: "Election Year 2012 and the Twilight of the Elites"

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 21:30:13 GMT

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Scholar Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks with journalist and MSNBC host Chris Hayes about his new book, Twilight Of The Elites.

Bosnobo: Primate Change - Artificial Intelligence Research

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 08:06:19 GMT

In Bosnobo: Primate Change, your bosnobos are thinking agents capable of learning from each other. Learning can be a random process, or forced by assigning a bosnobo as a teacher. By controlling the learning of your bosnobos and the priority in which they perform behaviors, all sorts of interesting outcomes could emerge, allowing for a wide variety of player strategies.

Play the game at http://gambit.mit.edu/bosnobo

Video by Steven Schirra

Interviews: Rizky Medzeva (Product Owner, Researcher), Andrew Grant (Staff Liaison, GAMBIT Technical Director)

Bosnobo: Primate Change was one of 7 games made at the MIT Game Lab during the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab Summer 2012 program. These games were made for researchers over the course of 9 weeks by student interns.

Movers & Shakers - Subversive Multiplayer Research

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 08:06:19 GMT

Movers & Shakers is a two-player tablet serious game created as a research tool to explore how players communicate based on conflicting perspectives within the game. The aim of Movers & Shakers is to create a meaningful conflict between its players and to facilitate a controversy beyond the screens.

Movers & Shakers is used as a research tool to explore how a social component influences experiences in serious games. In addition subversive game design elements are implemented in the game to foster the players’ thinking process and to get them out of unquestioned routines. In the game the players are challenged to give up their prior egoistic goals to reach their common goal – to save the world. In a nutshell, the game shifts from a competitive to a collaborational gameplay – once the players start communicating.

Download the game for Android Tablets at http://gambit.mit.edu/moversandshakers

Video by Steven Schirra

Interviews: Konstantin Mitgutsch (Product Owner, Researcher), Akash Thakkar (Audio Designer)

Movers & Shakers was one of 7 games made at the MIT Game Lab during the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab Summer 2012 program. These games were made for researchers over the course of 9 weeks by student interns.

Phantomation - Animation UI Research

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 08:06:19 GMT

Phantomation sets out to teach players how to use animation tools in the animation program Play Sketch. Play Sketch is an animation tool that allows the user to create quick, simple animations. It also introduces a new animation feature called real time, which allows the user to record animations demonstratively without having to manually set keyframes. Throughout the sixteen levels of the game, you will learn different animation techniques such as key framing and real time animation in order to possess objects. In the main levels,it is entirely up to the player whether they animate with key frames or real time animation techniques based on their preferences. The research from this game will answer if these new animation techniques make animation more accessible and easier to learn.

Play the game at http://gambit.mit.edu/phantomation

Video by Steven Schirra

Interviews: Abe Stein (Staff Liaison, GAMBIT Audio Director), Lex Johnson (Lead QA)

Phantomation was one of 7 games made at the MIT Game Lab during the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab Summer 2012 program. These games were made for researchers over the course of 9 weeks by student interns.

The Last Symphony - Game Design Research

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 08:06:19 GMT

The Last Symphony was created to showcase design strategies based on indexical storytelling. Hidden object games often include objects that are out of place or anachronistic in their scenes, or ask players to find objects that are largely unrelated to the storyline or the goal of the player. Collection of objects in The Last Symphony is not only directly tied to the player's goal, but also reveals the story through that process.

Play the game at http://gambit.mit.edu/thelastsymphony

Video by Steven Schirra

Interviews: Clara Fernández-Vara (Product Owner, Researcher), Richard Gould (Composter & Sound Designer)

The Last Symphony was one of 7 games made at the MIT Game Lab during the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab Summer 2012 program. These games were made for researchers over the course of 9 weeks by student interns.

2012 MIT Game Lab Symposium Part One: Introduction to the MIT Game Lab Past and Future

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 07:05:29 GMT

Part One: The 2012 MIT Game Lab Symposium: "Games In Everyday Life and Why That Matters To You"

An annual symposium to discuss the role of games throughout our lives today and the potential for collaboration and development with games research at the MIT Game Lab.A lecture about the past, present, and future of the MIT Game Lab.

Part One is the introduction of the symposium featuring a discussion between Henry Jenkins, the USC Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. William Uricchio the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and MIT Game Lab Creative Director Philip Tan. Video Produced by Generoso Fierro, Edited by Garrett Beazley. MIT Game Lab

2012 MIT Game Lab Symposium Part Five: Panel-Meaningful R&D Partners

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 07:05:28 GMT

Part Five: The 2012 MIT Game Lab Symposium: "Games In Everyday Life and Why That Matters To You"

An annual symposium to discuss the role of games throughout our lives today and the potential for collaboration and development with games research at the MIT Game Lab . Part Five is a panel entitled "Meaningful R&D Partners", a conversation about the potential for collaboration between games research and various industries.

The panel features moderator Philip Tan, the Creative Director of the MIT Game Lab. Panelists; Eitan Glinert, the founder and Creative Director of Fire Hose Games. He is also an alumni of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and the Education Arcade. His research interest is in games accessibility. Eric Klopfer, the Director of the MIT Teacher Education Program and the Scheller Career Development Professor of Science Education and Educational Technology at MIT. And Jenna Young, who spent most of her career in advertising, and is now at Weber Shandwick, one of the world’s leading PR firms.